Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday April 01, 2012 @03:26PM
from the getting-your-back-ups dept.

Fluffeh writes "The EFF has filed a brief in Federal Court on behalf of Kyle Goodwin (and potentially millions of other users) so that he can access his legally sound backup files. 'Goodwin is a local high school sports reporter and the sole proprietor of the company OhioSportsNet, who stored his video footage on Megaupload.com as a backup to his video library on his hard drive. He had paid €79.99 (about $107) for a two-year premium membership. Just days before the government seized the site, Goodwin's hard drive crashed. The brief states that his lost videos include footage to make highlight reels for parents to send to their children's prospective colleges, and an unfinished full-length documentary about the Strongsville girls soccer team's season.' According to the EFF, authorities told Carpathia (the hosting company that MegaUpload was using to host their content to the tune of $9,000 a day) that after it was done examining the servers and had copied portions of the data, the hosting company could delete the files and re-purpose its servers. Carpathia noted in a statement last week that it would like to allow Megaupload users to recover their data, but has struggled to find a way to do so."

authorities told Carpathia (the hosting company that MegaUpload was using to host their content to the tune of $9,000 a day) that after it was done examining the servers and had copied portions of the data, the hosting company could delete the files and re-purpose its servers

So after...
illegally seizing the servers,
illegally seizing the financial assets of a
non-US citizen using a
non-US financial service located in a
non-US controlled area,
the US government is now asking that
all the evidence and data be destroyed,
The company be buried in the US' endless appeal's process,
the end-users who legally used the service are labeled as criminals,
and the United States is once again proving to the world that it's financial networks, data networks, or any property located on, near, or in any way related to, itself is inherently untrustworthy for the purposes of conducting any form of commercial enterprise.

"We're judging this company as guilty before giving it an opportunity to defend itself and before we even gather evidence. Please delete all their data after we pull out anythign incriminating so both legitimate users are effected and they can't use it to defend themselves."

But megaupload didn't chose to do that did they? A foreign government did it for them. Just imagine if some non-western country had done something like this to a site as big as megaupload... We've prolly already be bombing someone.

> if you choose to keep no backups of your data and store it all in one place and it's lost,

For this guy, Megaupload *was* the backup. The TOS you quoted shows he did not choose a good backup option, as there is little guarantee. But even if he had chosen a cloud company specifically in the backup business, he would never be able to discard this kind of legal risk. At least for cloud companies with servers in the US (unfortunately).

What part of "...stored his video footage on Megaupload.com as a backup to his video library on his hard drive..." did you miss? Or is it that you define basic disaster recovery architecture, that stores files off-site in case of a local "disaster" (like a hard drive crash), as "all in one place"? The only thing that poor Kyle can be accused of is having the bad luck to lose his primary store before it could be backed up anew to someplace that RIAAs goon squad had yet to raid. Consider the scale of things, it's likely that there are others in the same boat.

The real story here is the fact that the goon squad doesn't give a shit about the damage they've done to legitimate customers of Megaupload/Carpathia. We've seen this pattern over and over - law enforcement doing millions of dollars of damage to innocent bystanders (legitimate businesses) when they indiscriminately pull the plug on hardware that might host something illegal. At least they had the courtesy to not seize it permanently this time, though unless the EFF prevails, that's some fucking small consolation.

Collective Punishment is a lazy and reviled method of government action which defiles the very idea of Justice. There was a time in this country where our leaders fretted over government encroachment stating things like "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated". In the digital era it is inexcusable that the government cannot make a best effort to identify offending content and release the rest of the content back to their rightful property owners. This is just another instance where the government favors the interests of the financial elites over the interests of the average citizen.

Just as America was a "Great Experiment" so is copyright law. The whole intent of it was to balance the incentives of content producers and consumers with the main goal of maximizing the progress of the Arts and Sciences. Today it has been perverted into an entitlement system where the government enforces perpetual royalties. In the information age where millions have higher educational skills the antiquated copyright laws only server to retard innovation. Even worse anyone caught in ambiguity like the person EFF is championing is now automatically presumed guilty. Fortunately this injustice is not lost on everyone. I feel EFF is the most effective non-profit organization I donate to and I plan to increase my monthly contribution.

What makes you think that Amazon S3 or any other service will "definitely not be shut down"?All the MPAA/RIAA and their government goon squad need is a certain level of paranoia that you are storing something that they don't like and "all your fella data here belong us".